THE British campaign centred on the Crimean port of Sevastopol, which they besieged with the help of a specially-built railway.* A Russian relief force was rebuffed at Balaclava, and there were victories at Alma Heights and Inkerman.
But casualties were high and in an age of mass-produced print, that could no longer pass unnoticed. The public was reading Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade within six weeks.* The ‘thin red line’ of the 93rd Highlanders; bitter winter, inadequate equipment, festering disease; Florence Nightingale,* the ‘lady with the lamp’, nursing amid the ‘humane barbarity’ of field hospitals — all struck home though the colourful pen of William Howard Russell of the Times, the first embedded war correspondent.
The rising scandal cost Aberdeen his position, and Lord Palmerston, no friend of Russia, agreed peace at Paris on 30th March, 1856; the Russians were only too ready to sign, thanks to the Royal Navy’s threatened blockade of St Petersburg. Turkey undertook to be nicer to Christians but the Balkans remained under Ottoman suzerainty, and for a generation hysterical Russophobia blinded Westminster to the growing threat from Berlin.*
* The ‘Grand Central Crimean Railway’ was a 14-mile stretch of track from the Alliance’s harbour at Balaclava to the Russian port of Sevastopol. It was the brainchild of engineers Samuel Morton Peto and Thomas Brassey, and boasted several steam locomotives including an armoured 0-6-0 tank ‘Alliance’, built in Leeds and adorned with English, French, Sardinian, and Turkish flags. For more detail, see Anthony Dawson’s blog Notes from the Crimea. Another novel but thoroughly shameful military innovation was an invitation from the Government to Michael Faraday to experiment with chemical weapons, which was very firmly turned down.
* See The Charge of the Light Brigade.
* Florence was a pioneer in nursing education, sanitation and the logistics of battlefield medical treatment, who worked her social contacts in Government and the press to great effect. See Florence Nightingale.
* See Misreading Russia, taken from a pamphlet written in 1856 by Richard Cobden MP. Cobden had spent time in Russia, and believed that, other than to rescue Orthodox Christians from oppression in the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the Russian people had no appetite for territorial expansion.
